Rock art, Drummin, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Rock art, Drummin, Co. Wicklow

A flat granite boulder sitting close to the ground above the Keocha Brook in County Wicklow carries roughly twenty-two small circular depressions, each averaging about four centimetres across and no more than a centimetre deep.

These are cup marks, among the most ancient and least understood forms of human mark-making found across Ireland and Britain, and their purpose remains genuinely contested. What is certain is that someone, at some point in prehistory, chose this particular stone and worked it deliberately, pecking out hollow after hollow across its surface.

The boulder itself is modest in scale, measuring just over a metre from north to south and less than a metre east to west, rising only about thirty-eight centimetres from the ground. It is earthfast, meaning it is fixed in the earth rather than a loose surface find, which gives it a sense of deliberate placement in the landscape. The cup marks are scattered across the face of the stone, with the densest cluster towards its centre. The site sits on relatively level ground overlooking the Keocha Brook, and that relationship to water, a recurring feature at cup-marked sites elsewhere in Ireland, may or may not be coincidental. The Wicklow Rock Art Project, run through the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin under the direction of Dr. Clíodhna Ní Lionáin, has produced a photogrammetric three-dimensional model of the stone, a technique that uses overlapping photographs to build a precise digital surface, allowing the shallow carvings to be studied in detail that would be difficult to achieve in ordinary lighting conditions.

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